From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Arabic loanwords in English are words acquired directly from Arabic or else indirectly by passing from Arabic into a third language (often Latin or Spanish) and then into English. Some of these Arabic loanwords are not of ancient Arabic origin, but are loanwords within Arabic itself, coming into Arabic from Persian, Greek or other languages.

To qualify for this list, a word must be reported in leading etymology dictionaries as having an Arabic origin. A handful of etymology dictionaries has been used as the source for the list.[1] In cases where the dictionaries disagree, the minority view is omitted. Rare and arcane words are also omitted. A bigger listing including many words very rarely seen in English is at En.Wiktionary.Org.

الغول - الكحول in the literature of late European alchemy, the quintessence of an earthly substance. See kohl in this list. The idea of "quintessences of earthly substances" and the use of "alcohol" to denote quintessences are developments in European alchemy in the 14th century. From the 1500s on, the denotation of "alcohol" narrowed down to "quintessence of wine" or "spirit of wine", i.e., ethanol, CH3CH2OH, as the term "alcool vini" (quintessence of wine) got shortened to "alcool" or "alcohol". The term alco(h)ol vini supplanted the original quinta essentia vini, "fifth essence of wine".[3]

Today a large family of plants (2000 species). Some had medicinal use in medieval times and the word comes from Arabic أبو أرق abū ‘āraq meaning "sweat inducer" [6]. Some plants of the borage family are named Alkanet, from Arabic علقنا al kanna, from Arabic حنة henna.[6]

Arguably from سوادة suwwāda, سويد suwayd, or سويدة suwayda, a species of plant whose ashes yield sodium carbonate[11], and alternatively from Arabic suda or laksa'uda, meaning headache, which becomes a name for a headache remedy in Latin sodanum.[12]

It has been suggested [19] that the Latin and general European term 'baccalaureatus' derives from the Arabic phrase bi-haqq al-riwayati, which occurs in Ijazah degrees that were awarded by Madrassas (Islamic schools) as early as 1147 CE. The OED, while admitting that its origins are not clear, do not link it to Arabic.

Monequin is old French (recorded as Monnekin by Hainault in 14c.). May be a diminutive of a personal name, or could be from the general Romanic word and this could ultimately be from the Arabic maimun "monkey," literally "auspicious," but a euphemism, since the sight of apes was held by some Arabs to be unlucky. See Dictionary Reference.com.

Notes about the list

The various etymology dictionaries are not always consistent with each other. This reflects differences in judgment about the reliability or uncertainty of a given etymological derivation. In cases where one dictionary reports an Arabic etymology but it's not supported by reports in other leading dictionaries, the word doesn't qualify for inclusion on the list.

Obsolete or very rarely used non-technical words are not included in the list (even when the etymology dictionaries include them), but some specialist technical words are included. For example, the technical word "alidade" is the Arabic name for an ancient measuring instrument used by surveyors to determine line-of-sight direction. Despite few English-speaking people being acquainted with it, the device's name remains part of the traditional craft of English-speaking surveyors, and is included in the list.

The above listing has been restricted to loan words: It excludes loan translations (aka calques). Here's an example of a loan translation. The amygdala is a modern scientific word for a structure in the brain. The word comes from the Greek for almond. The structure has a physical resemblence to an almond. The almond resemblence was first conceived by Arab physicians, who labelled the structure "al-lauzatan", which is almond in Arabic. Europeans later directly translated "al-lauzatan" into Latin by using the Greek word "amygdala" for it.[14] Amygdala is thus an Arabic loan translation, not a loan word. Another example of a technical Arabic loan translation is dura mater. The dura mater is the tough outer layer of membrane surrounding the brain and spinal cord. Quoting an etymology dictionary: "Medieval Latin "dura mater cerebri", literally "hard mother of the brain," a loan-translation of Arabic umm al-dimagh as-safiqa, literally "thick mother of the brain". In Arabic, the words 'father,' 'mother,' and 'son' are often used to denote relationships between things."[15] The word "sine" -- as in sine, cosine and tangent -- is another example of an Arabic loan translation.[16] The majority of Arabic loanwords can be traced to the medieval Islamic Golden Age, but these examples of loan translations indicate that the medieval translators from Arabic to Latin brought in some unquantified number of Arabic words via loan translations in preference to loans.